"It profits me but little that a vigilant authority always protects the tranquillity of my pleasures and constantly averts all dangers from my path, without my care or concern, if this same authority is the absolute master of my liberty and my life."

--Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America

Wednesday, May 22, 2013

The Obama Scandals and Plausible Deniability

Back in the days of Watergate yore, political wags used to talk about the President maintaining "plausible deniability," meaning that he had to be separate enough from dirty dealings so that he later could deny having known about them with a straight face.

It's getting harder to believe that Barack Obama's denials of knowledge of the IRS' targeting of conservatives and the DOJ's bugging of Fox will remain "plausible." The proposition won't scan logically... a President who spoke constantly throughout his tenure of "enemies" and "revenge" and "punching back twice as hard" and "bringing a knife to a gun fight," who demonized and tried to delegitimize the Tea Party and FoxNews, who seems to glory in the raw power of his office -- the ability to summon drones to kill terrorists (and their families and passersby), to dispense trillions to favored constituents (read: Solyndra, Fiskar, etc.), to command performances at the White House of the creamiest of the cream of Hollywood and the entertainment industry -- do we really believe that this President would shrink from using the IRS or the DOJ to punish his political opposition? Do we really believe that this President, with this level of narcissism, wouldn't revel in hearing about how his minions had hamstrung Tea Party groups' fund-raising? Do we really believe that this President, with his hatred for Fox, wouldn't have been happy to hear that the network's White House correspondent had his phone records secretly subpoenaed?

To the contrary, anyone whose eyes have been open the past five years knows that there were high-fives in the White House when Obama was told of the IRS' targeting of Tea Party 501(c)(4) groups, and again when he was told that FoxNews' James Rosen's phone records had been seized.

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About Me

I am a husband and a father all the time.
During the day, I am an attorney, specializing in large-scale commercial litigation.
In politics, I am a big "R" Republican and a little "d" democrat, meaning I believe in people more than government.
In sports, I am a lover of the St. Louis Cardinals, the Green Bay Packers, and the Duke Blue Devils.
I was once an English professor at Marquette University in Milwaukee, before I grew out of it.
I used to be a Protestant. Then I was a typical over-educated pretentious agnostic. Then I became a semi-Catholic, meaning that my wife is Catholic, my children are Catholic, and I was waiting for lightning to strike. Now I am just a plain old Catholic. Like Chesterton, I wanted to found my own heresy, to be in advance of the age, in advance of the truth. And I found that I was two thousand years behind it.